Multi-dimensional seismic reflection survey techniques, for example two dimensional (2-D) and three dimensional (3-D) seismic reflection survey techniques, have allowed the petroleum industry to generate remarkably accurate subsurface models to discover oil and gas deposits several thousand meters below the earth's surface, making deep oil drilling an economically viable procedure.
The minerals industry has made a considerable investment in multi-dimensional seismic reflection techniques to adapt the procedure for detecting the presence of massive sulphide deposits. However, the use of multi-dimensional seismic technologies by the minerals industry has thus far met with comparatively less success. In most cases, a massive sulphide will be extremely difficult to discern amongst the other strata of the geological region being explored.
To date, mineral exploration using seismic reflection surveys has been typically done on broad spectrum of geological terrain known to be potential sites for massive sulphides. Unfortunately, many of these regions exhibit poor signal to noise conditions. This relatively poor data has been found to be an inherent feature in multi-dimensional seismic exploration for massive sulphides. Experts in the field have worked diligently to overcome these problems by using state-of-the-art acquisition and processing strategies derived from the petroleum industry, hoping to filter out the noise and to generate an accurate, dependable subsurface geological model based on the remaining relatively poor acoustic signature of the massive sulphide deposit. With this goal in mind, experts have developed a number of sophisticated procedures which have been published in a number of leading mining journal articles.
However, these investigations have thus far not yielded significant useful results.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a novel technique for prospecting for massive sulphides.